All posts by Ronell

Search engine optimization has been important to the health of websites for a very long time. It is difficult to make a successful website if it is not showing up in search engines.

Some people have tried to game the system so that their sites would shoot to the top of search engine rankings. While this occasionally brought site-owners short-term success, it eventually leads to SEO penalties.

Anyone that owns a website should be aware of the history of SEO penalties. When you look closely at these penalties and why they were handed out, you will see that there is a lot you can learn about proper search engine optimization.

Bad Links

Search engines look at some factors when they are trying to determine how to rank a website. One of the things they consider is “backlinks.” They look at how many sites link back to a specific site. If numerous sites are linking out to a website, the search engines will assume that the website meets a high level of quality.

Many site owners have tried to exploit this. They have bought thousands of cheap backlinks for next to nothing and then waited for the traffic to roll in. Great SEO Agencies, like Bradford Crabtree, can help you avoid and even remove SEO penalties. However, get stuck with the wrong company and your site could be headed for the de-indexed list.

However, search engines can see the sites that are linking out to other websites. If a site has a high number of bad links, that site will not see its search rankings rise. Instead, the site’s rankings will plummet.

Hidden Links

Some sites have tried to conceal various links from the general public. Site owners know that search engines are not able to “see” a site the way a person does. Some designers hide tens or even hundreds of links in their CSS or Javascript coding.

Search engines have adapted and learned how to spot these hidden links. If site owners try to hide links to trick search engines, they will usually be hit with some SEO penalty.

Excessive Downtime

It is normal for sites to experience downtime every once in a while. Even the biggest sites on the internet, like Facebook, have experienced periods of downtime.

No site will be penalized if the site goes down every once in a while. However, if a site is down all the time, that site’s search rankings will fall.

It is vitally important for site owners to make sure they have enough bandwidth the support the level of traffic that they receive. If their site is always failing to load in, their site will eventually fail to show up in searches.

While ET-94 never made its amazing journey to space, the huge space shuttle fuel tank is getting a second life. On Thursday, it was announced that the piece of machinery would travel along the Panama Canal and soon make its way through the streets of Los Angeles until it arrives at its new home.

That new home will be the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The tank, which weighs 32.5 tons, will join Endeavor, a space shuttle. One of the most surprising aspects may be the size of the fuel tank, which is longer than the shuttle. The ET-94 measures 27.6 feet in diameter as well as 154 feet in length.

The journey could take up to eight weeks this April via barge from a New Orleans NASA facility. After passing through the Panama Canal, the fuel tank will debark at Marina del Rey in Southern California. The following journey may be the most difficult part, in spite of the fact that it encompasses just 12 miles. The tank will be hitting the freeway and city streets, eventually arriving in downtown Los Angeles.

The road portion of the epic journey alone is likely to take up to 18 hours. The museum expects that the tank will arrive on May 21st, and not without huge fanfare. Preparation for the big day is already underway. Plans to trim back trees, raise telephone lines, and temporarily remove light poles will make for a smooth ride. It may have cost $10 million to move the Endeavor, but it will cost less than one-third of that to move the tank.

Tanks like the ET-94 were designed to be expendable; however, this one was never used. Only three tanks survive. This one was originally designed to fuel engines by holding oxygen and hydrogen before being dropped to burn or fall into the ocean.

This tank did not fly, but researchers did use it to learn more about the Columbia disaster. It was able to help researchers determine why the shuttle broke as it entered Earth’s atmosphere in 2003, which led to the deaths of seven crew members on board. Foam insulation had broken off, damaging one of the wings of the shuttle. This allowed the combination of wind and heat to take out the wing entirely.

By looking at the insulating foam of the ET-94, researchers were able to learn much about the piece that could influence the future of spacecraft.

In January 2015, Los Angeles, California saw an 18,000 drop in its employment numbers even though its unemployment rate for the previous month was relatively low at nearly six percent. This may seem strange, but once you ask a few people why they are out of work, it may make better sense. Perhaps Mary has not found the right fit for her, while Harry grows weary of never finding work and eventually gives up.

Los Angeles had about 4.4 million workers in January 2014, as opposed to the dropped numbers for January 2015. Surprisingly, Los Angeles county’s unemployment rate was the same as the whole state of California. Normally once the holiday season is over, employment numbers decrease anyway because the seasonal positions are no longer needed. This is expected to happen within certain businesses each year, and Los Angeles County started it with about 88,000 empty positions.

The numbers keep record of the progress, or lack of progress for the county within a given year. To the person who was holding out hope that their seasonal job would turn into a permanent position, those numbers mean unemployment. The devastation of the loss could make him or her decide to give up on finding another job, or make the long-term decision to go back to school. Earning a degree could be a step up to a more permanent position, giving that many SEO companies in Los Angeles prefer to hire people with some secondary education.

The Employment Development Department in California takes in affect the loss of those seasonal jobs after the holidays are over. With this factored in, Los Angeles still recorded a loss of 14,000 jobs in January. Unfortunately, the manufacturing business loss about 7,000 jobs. Once the adjustment was made by the EDD, the December 2014 employment number for Los Angeles was more like 4.37 million instead of the previous 4.4 million reported in January 2015. The seasonal jobs were not considered actual jobs. Therefore, the numbers could not reflect a loss of those jobs.

The loss also does not completely come from the elimination of seasonal positions. There could be companies needing to lighten their payroll for reasons such as filing for bankruptcy. According to the EDD, retail businesses suffered the harshest loss at nearly 19,000. Retailers are normally the businesses that tack on more workers during the holidays to meet the high shopping demand during the season.

Even though the unemployment rate drop for Los Angeles County was a good thing, there was a big drop in the amount of jobs to be had. All in all, Los Angeles had a 2.2 percent growth in payroll numbers from January 2014 to January 2015. This included up to 12, 400 for professional business services; up to almost 20,000 for food accommodation services, and health care and social assistance went up to a little over 27,000.

One of the first accidents to happen between Google’s self-driving cars and a public transit bus was due to the fault of a computer algorithm. According to the reports filed on February 14th by the Department of Motor Vehicles in Los Angeles, California, a Lexus RX450h SUV crashed into a bus while in autonomous mode.

The accident between the autonomous vehicle (also known as an AV), and the transit bus happened in Mountain View, California on El Camino Real, near Google’s headquarters.

There was a test driver in the vehicle, but the car was in autonomous mode. Luckily, there were no injuries from the accident.

According to the reports, the self-driving Lexus SUV was prepared to make a right turn on Castro Street. The vehicle was in the right-hand lane of a three lane street. The Google self-driving car wasn’t able to make the right turn due to sand bags that were obstructing the lane. This required the vehicle to move into the center lane in order to make a right turn.

The self-driving vehicle correctly allowed multiple vehicles to pass before attempting to proceed around the sand bag obstruction. A bus approached behind the Lexus SUV at 15 MPH. It was noted that the test driver, who sat in the front passenger seat, could see the bus in the left-hand mirror. The self-driving Lexus was going 2 MPH when bus collided into the SUV causing damage on the front-left fender, sensor and wheel of the Lexus.

As reported from the Los Angeles DMV accident report, the test driver thought that the bus would have come to a complete stop, allowing the Google AV to proceed. However, it took only three seconds for the SUV to make contact with the bus.

These are everyday situations that human drivers have to deal with on streets and highways.

The Google AV positioned itself to proceed while another vehicle was incoming. The computer algorithm predicted that transit bus would either stop or slow down enough to allow it to pass. Even the test driver had the same notion. However, in this case, both the computer and test driver were wrong.

Alphabet (the parent company of Google) has taken the blame for the Google AV accident. This is the believed to be the first autonomous mode accident out of 1.5 million miles driven. As reported in Reuters, Google has stated they bear some reasonability. However, the transit agency is still investigating and has not determined liability.

Accidents with self-driving cars will provide more evidence to Consumer Watchdog groups who are constantly warning about autonomous driving to make their case regarding stricter regulations, vehicle standards and technology.

Groups against self-driving vehicles state that accidents like these are all the proof they need to show that the technology is not efficient as a human driver would be. The project director for a Consumer Watchdog group, John Simpson noted that for every autonomous vehicle crash, police must be called to the scene, video and technical data should be gathered as evidence and the information should be made public.

Although this may be the first autonomous vehicle accident reported in Los Angeles by the DMV in 2016, there have been 17 reports filed by Google over the past six years. In those 17 cases, Google was not blamed in any of those accidents.

With over 1 million miles, Google has launched a fleet of 23 Lexus RX450h SUV’s on the roads of California. Alphabet Inc. will not only improve on the technology, but also, will learn from this incident to ensure self-driving improvements for situations like these.

Being a female in the entrepreneurship world isn’t only challenging, but it’s not always accepted with open arms. In fact, in studies conducted by WalletHub, Los Angeles as a whole doesn’t provide a very welcome environment for female entrepreneurs.

Another national survey of “2016’s Best and Worst Cities for Women-Owned Businesses,” studied one-hundred metropolitan areas across the United States. From here, the people conducting the survey looked at specific metrics, including the average profits of businesses in the areas, how friendly the areas are toward working mothers, and even the percentages of businesses that were owned by women in the local economy.

Statistics for Metropolitan Regions

Now looking at the specific statistics for the metropolitan region of Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, we can see just how low the rankings are toward the friendliness of female-owned businesses. This region ranked 78th of the one-hundred metropolitan areas studied. It also ranked 70th place for female business owners for “Overall New-Business Friendliness.” Other rankings include 59th by “WalletHub ‘Working Moms’,” and 85th on the topic for “Average Revenue Growth of Women-Owned Businesses.”

A study performed by the Los Angeles SEO Firm, not all feedback was reported as bad news. Los Angeles ranked in 7th place in the category of female entrepreneurship. On top of that, it came in 18th place nationally for the highest percentage of women owning businesses in its local economy. This just comes to show that even though Los Angeles doesn’t have the friendliest attitude toward female entrepreneurs, female entrepreneurship is on the incline and is hoped to become more widely accepted as the years go on.

Overcoming Obstacles

Although there are many obstacles that average female entrepreneur faces, there are also ways to get through these obstacles step-by-step. Here’s a list of helpful tips female entrepreneurs can utilize while climbing to the top:

– Utilizing connections with other business owners
– Being decisive about decisions whether large or small
– Having the necessary access to funding when opening a business
– Not allowing others’ expectations to get the best of them
– Managing time well
– Last but not least, not fearing success

Local Economy

According to the Los Angeles Business Journal (LABJ), small businesses overall face tough times in Los Angeles. A recent job forecast report released by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. (LAEDC) shows that economic growth will begin to level off during 2016. By adding 95,000 jobs to the economy in 2015, the growth rate increased 2.2%. However, by creating an estimate of 73,000 new jobs this year, the economy is estimated to decline to 1.7% in 2016. On top of that, looking out at 2017, it’s only estimated that 44,000 new jobs will be created, causing the economic growth to decline even further to a rate of 1.0%.

Even though this is estimated to be a steady decline in the job growth rate, the calculations don’t factor in all the businesses that have cut jobs or have closed—in reality, on average, 1 in 4 companies close after their first year of operation. Even though the rate of economic growth is estimated to decline, the unemployment rate in Los Angeles rose to approximately 6% in 2015 and is only expected to remain fairly constant up to 2017.

Although Los Angeles isn’t the friendliest city toward female entrepreneurs, there are always ways to overcome this obstacle by following the tips stated previously in this article. Females have the potential to overcome anything when pursuing entrepreneurship, even with the odds stacked against them.

While there are certainly risks to blogger outreach, the benefits are tremendous so it is definitely well worth it to make these connections. As a matter of fact, the largest risk that you take when touching base with top-tier publishers is having an uneducated representative send an email on your behalf.

At Youth Noise, the company owners got together and created a training guide that ensures that all of our associates are educated correctly before they ever perform any type of blogger outreach on behalf of any of our clients. Read More

For the most part, negativity on the Internet in the form of negative feedback is usually created from three particular problems that can easily be avoided. They are:

Research

To start with, one of the biggest industry problems that many people encounter when creating content for a content marketing campaign is the lack of research. Many people put out non-authoritative content that they have no business writing. They put out content that is incorrect or they share information that is outdated. This is certainly going to upset some people and you can expect to experience negative feedback in situations like this. Read More